How do you go from some silicon wafer with some metallic lines printed on it to having a GUI desktop. I don’t understand the intersection between hardware and software at the fundamental level.
In: Technology
A lot of people go right to the logic gates and stuff but I always found it to be most intuitive to think about it like this.
1. An electric circuit can be either on or off, meaning it can represent two states.
2. Similar to something like morse code, you can encode numbers so they’re represented by only two symbols, like, say, various patterns of just “1” and “0”, or, “on” and “off”.
3. Combine those two facts and you can now represent numbers with electricity. Like a row of LED lights where some are either on or off, which can be decoded back to the corresponding numbers based on the rules of our code.
4. You can also set up clever electric circuits that allow you to add two numbers. Like two sets of switches where you enter your number codes as the input and one set of LEDs that light up with the encoded representation of the added up result.
5. Once you can add up two numbers, you basically have the building block for all other mathematical operations.
6. Once you can do all mathematical operations with a circuit, you can basically have them perform any kind of function.
7. Make those circuits smaller and smaller so you can run more and more of them in parallel and you can have them do more and more complex functions
8. Now you have a computer.
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